I was told that there are many technological items that we use every
day that produce muons, which I am given to understand is a particle
of cosmic radiation. Is this true?

No household appliance has anywhere near the amount of energy required
to produce muons.

Muons are particles of cosmic radiation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muons

----------------------
http://www.lanl.gov/p/rh_npa_liu.shtml

The RHIC at BNL and the PHENIX Experiment

The Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National
Laboratory (BNL) collides two ion beams of various types, ranging from
protons and deuterons to gold nuclei types, at energies of 100 GeV per
nucleon. In such high-energy collisions, quarks and gluons interact
directly, thus allowing us to directly probe the nucleus' parton
distributions.

The PHENIX experiment at RHIC consists of a general-purpose detector
that possesses unique attributes among the five RHIC experiments,
including two spectrometers designed to measure high-energy muons over
the forward and backward pseudorapidity range 1.2 < |?| < 2.4. They
are also the largest subsystems in the PHENIX experiment. The
Subatomic Physics (P?]25) PHENIX Team has led the design,
construction, and operation of the muon spectrometers, and is now
leading efforts to analyze the muon data. Figure 4 shows an artist's
view of the PHENIX muon spectrometers.